A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Archive of Wolff Materials

Monday, July 31, 2017

Two people posted comments about my bitter sweet
reminiscences of a time when it seemed that Marx’s approach to an
understanding of capitalism might be staging a comeback. The first is someone who uses as his or her
web name Voltaire’s famous injunction about the Catholic Church, l’écrasez l’infame.” The second signs him or herself F. Lengyel,
which a little Googling suggests might be the name of a mathematician. On this quiet Monday morning, while I wait to
see whether the White House explodes, I should like to respond.

I am delighted that l’écrasez
[or, to use his or her proper name, M. or Mme. Infame] found my book, Understanding Marx, helpful and even
inspiring. Indeed, I am thrilled. That is what authors hope for and dream
of! If it is true that my little book
made him/her a Marxist, what could possibly be better?

F. Lengyel also writes about the relation of Marxism to
math, with a reference to Herb Gintis, who was, with his colleague Sam Bowles,
an early inspiration for me when I was first digging deeply into Marx’s
thought. I have always believed that Sam
and Herb [as everyone at UMass referred to them] took a wrong turn when they
scuttled Marxism for Game Theory, but that is a large subject for another day.

Modern Neo-Classical economists occupy an odd and
fundamentally inauthentic position in the Academy, at least to my jaundiced
eye, a position illuminated in a way by the famous essay by the British
novelist and scientist C.P. Snow, “The Two Cultures.” Snow writes acerbically about the appalling
ignorance of the most elementary science exhibited by supremely self-confident,
even arrogant, classicists, historians, and philosophers in Oxford and
Cambridge Senior Common Rooms. The gulf
between the two cultures is asymmetric, as Snow makes clear, because whereas
even the most prosaic scientist will have at least heard of Shakespeare and
Plato and Shelley, distinguished classical scholars experience not a scintilla
of embarrassment at their total ignorance of such elementary terms as mass,
acceleration, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Economists are housed in Divisions of Behavioral Science,
but they queen it around as better than their fellow Social Scientists and
Humanists because they make use of calculus and linear algebra. Now the truth is that these are undergraduate
subjects to a math major, hardly worth making a fuss about, but economists make
much of their equations, looking down their noses condescendingly at
philosophers or historians who never include an integral sign or a Sigma in
their professional papers. Philosophers,
eternal wannabes, scatter backwards E’s in their prose, even when there is no
conceivable need for them, and write things like “S knows that p” as though
they were intoning the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Sunday, July 30, 2017

I have become, by default, the family archivist, and so it
is that my big sister, sifting through a lifetime of accumulated papers, from
time to time puts together a little bundle and sends it to me. The latest packet included a tearsheet from
the May 29, 1985 issue of the Chronicle
of Higher Education containing a portion of a long interview I gave to them
on the occasion of the publication of Understanding
Marx, my first book on the thought of Karl Marx. Barbara did not have the entire interview,
and I have absolutely no recollection of having given it, but when I read again
what is on the sheet, I was touched and saddened by my effusions of optimism. I had just completed a decade of intense
study of the new mathematical reinterpretation of Classical and Marxian
political economy published by sophisticated left economists around the world
in the’60s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s. Here
are some lines from the interview to give you a sense of my boundless
enthusiasm for this new development.

“Although I don’t for a moment imagine that political
movements start in somebody’s head, with a theory, I think that theories are an
important part of political movements.
There comes a point when a political movement – or a possible political
movement – needs theoretical tools to direct itself, and that’s starting to
happen…. I have a keen sense of my own limitations and I don’t for a moment imagine
that I’m capable of doing serious, theoretically innovative work in economic.” [Mr. Wolff] sees himself as “a kind of
cheerleader” for all the scholars engaged in the mathematical reinterpretation
of Marx. “I’m in favor of all of them
and I’m delighted when they do this stuff because it’s marvelous and exciting….
Until I got involved in this stuff, I never showed my work to other
people. Now I have a sense of myself as
being part of an enterprise that’s larger than myself…’ Summing up the shift in the course of his
career, [Mr. Wolff] said, “it was like being reborn.”

Saturday, July 29, 2017

“Look Jerry, I think what you have to say
about painting is very good, but drop the politics.” This was a common refrain
when I first began teaching painting. But painting and politics, for me, has
always been inexorably linked. Things are better these days, however. I have
learned to frame my points in ways that are, shall we say, more congenial. In
fact, I have even been called “warm and fuzzy” of late. But my mantra hasn’t
changed: learning to paint is learning new ways to be free. And the point of it
all is to become who you are most.

I began
my study of painting, as a teenager, in the studio of William Schultz whose
teachers before him led back to Paris of the 1880s. One key teacher-painter in
this lineage who brought 19th century Parisian art theory back to
the U.S. was Robert Henri.[1]
Henri was recruited by Emma Goldman to teach in her Modern School of the Ferrer Society in Greenwhich Village that she and
Alexander Berkman had founded in honor of the Spanish educator, Francisco
Ferrer.Many of Henri’s students[2] went
on to enjoy successful painting careers. Another of Henri’s notable students, however,
experienced a degree of success in a field not unrelated to art. His name was
Leon Trotsky. So the admonitions and caveats passed down from teacher to
student within the studio, in my case, was steeped in a strong regard for
individual autonomy and self-direction.

A
recurrent theme of Henri’s[3]
was quite simple: paintings ought to be the by-product of a mood that one might
achieve by crossing into a competing realm of perception. “The object of
painting a picture is not to make a picture,” taught Henri. Rather, “The
picture is a by-product….[of] the attainment of a state of being…a more than
ordinary moment of existence.” With this particular approach to painting, then,
we find that emotions are cherished as is the sense of wonder. The
understanding is that all external measures of the work, market value for
example, must be pushed aside entirely as one works. We don’t look for results
during the process. The notion of finish is a category mistake. It is
imperative to stay in the moment. The measure of thing are the feelings that
arise as we move along and that we can’t possibly know until our brush touches
the canvas because the making of marks is not just an act of expression, but an
act of making determinant, of realizing, who we are.

The reader will recognize this story: human
life is seen as an activity of expression; moreover, the self-realization that
occurs is something that unfolds from herself. Therefore, the activity of
painting (for the painter) when properly understood[4] is
the privileged medium through which her potential or who she is most, unfolds.

Heady stuff. But this is precisely the
point at which Eeyore makes his appearance. If the above is true, then the
question arises, do our institutions cohere to enable this type of freedom? Is
our way of life authentic in this regard? Does everyone rightfully have the
need to access this expressive activity and self-realization? Regretfully the
answer is no. As brilliant entrepreneurs, we move in a different direction: we
wish to master and objectify nature (and people as nature as well). We believe
the world to be inherently calculable. As painter-entrepreneurs, it is not
necessary that we fulfill ourselves in the process because the point of the
exercise is to have the work get us through the door. Results are everything.
Reason is separate from feeling and thought from senses. And as Charles Taylor
points out, from the point of view of someone like Henri (or a Monet who
reports that no one gets what is important to him, namely that it is necessary
to stand before nature in “total self-surrender”), “These false views [are]
more than just intellectual errors…but an obstacle to human fulfillment….”[5]

I have found a way, however, to have
Tigger enter the discussion and relieve the anxiety of my students without disengaging from the larger critique: in
this world of disenchantment and alienation, there remain “sites of Enchantment”
replete with “affective attachments,” “passages” to realms of experience where
we “give greater expression to play,” where nature is “lively,” where “wonder”
is key, where there can be “fleeting returns to a childlike excitement about
life,” and where we can “hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity
of things.” [6]

Now, I’m a painter and I’m not entirely
sure how much of this generalizes to other disciplines of art. But I do think
that what I have said here and the type of painting that I do while not
“carrying a revolutionary message performs a revolutionary function.”[7]
For those of you who wish to watch me paint for a minute or two while
sermonizing a bit, go here: http://bit.ly/2w8NQJz

[2]
For example, there were George Bellows, Robert Brackman, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, and Rockwell Kent among many
others.

[3]
This theme has been articulated in varying degrees, as well, by such painters
as Manet, Cèzanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Rothko and a number of
contemporary painters such as Wolf Kahn.

[4]
The notion here is that while I may be looking at the house, I don’t see the
house as such, but rather the sensations that the house triggers within me as a
visual artist. My work does not refer to something outside of myself. The
feelings that I express and the description that happens along the way (in so
doing) are one.

[6]
See Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of
Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton University
Press, 2001). What was marvelous about this book for me was that Bennett
provided a framework for what countless painters have been saying for decades.
For example, not only have painters emphasized “feeling larger” over and over
again, but some painters like Cèzanne actually converse with their subject
matter.

[7]
Joachim Pissarro speaking of the work of his great-grandfather Camille.

Friday, July 28, 2017

This was a great moment, one of the very few we will have under Trump. Enjoy! The seemingly slippery Susan Collins held firm for once, and Lisa Murkowski reclaimed Alaska's reputation after Sarah Palin trashed it. As for McCain, I would bet good money that this was his long desired and patiently awaited payback for Trump's dismissive and condescending remark about his war service. The wheels are coming off the wagon. For the first time in quite a while, I enjoyed the morning TV news shows.Later on I shall have more to say about Paris, among other things.

Thursday, July 27, 2017

We flew home yesterday without incident to find this country preparing to hurt vulnerable people in a myriad of ways. So much ugliness is being perpetrated so quickly that it is difficult to find the emotional resources for appropriate anger and outrage.As a diversion, I will tell one small story about our Paris stay. Susie spent a good deal of time trying to bring order into the disarray of the plant life that decorates the interior courtyard of our copropriété. While she was working, she came across this fearsome beast and called for me to memorialize it with my IPhone. Herewith the result. The faint of heart are warned.

Monday, July 24, 2017

When I was a young man, words poured from my pen like a torrent
of water from a fire hose. I published
my first book in 1963. By the time I
left Columbia, eight years later, my thirteenth book was in press. The flood slowed to a stream, and then a
trickle, as the years went by. Books on
Kant’s ethics, on John Rawls’ A Theory of
Justice, several edited books, then the long, deep investigation of the
thought of Karl Marx, which yielded two books and a series of long articles. In 1992, I transferred to Afro-American
Studies, and other than a memoir of that extraordinary experience, the periodic
editions of a textbook, and two volumes about my parents and grandparents never
intended for publication, my pen fell silent.
For eight wonderful years I even made a serious study of the viola and
played string quartets with three friends, until retirement brought that to a
close.

Through the many years of silence, words had accumulated
unheeded in my mind, and when I launched this blog on the last day of June in
2009, a dam broke. Over the next few
years, I wrote on-line a three volume autobiography, a book about the use of
formal methods in political philosophy, and countless “tutorials,” some of them twenty
or thirty thousand words long. In all, I
wrote more than 500,000 words, the equivalent of six or seven books. And all the while, silently, for the most
part unnoticed, I grew older, until, when I looked up from the keyboard, it
seemed I was eighty-three years old.

Slowly, my blog acquired a small, rather distinguished circle
of regular readers and commentators, a grand unending seminar in which I was as
much tutee as tutor. Somehow, after a
lifetime of teaching and writing, I had found the ideal intellectual community,
an international friendship of minds and voices which, or so it seemed, would sustain
me for the rest of my life.

And then Trump happened.
At first, I found words to express my dismay and horror, words to
encourage others to take action, to resist, words to articulate some
understanding of the sheer evil that Trump and his entourage visited thoughtlessly,
carelessly, on any too weak to defend themselves. But little by little, the words grew banal,
feeble, inconsequent. The words that had
been my life stilled.

Saturday, July 22, 2017

There have been several news stories in the past forty-eight
hours that have received a good deal of attention and about which I should
perhaps comment. The first, which is
really quite unimportant, is that Sean Spicer has resigned as Presidential
spokesperson, apparently because he had been sidelined by the appointment of a
scrimy character named Anthony Scaramucci as head of the White House press
operation. One of the relaxing features
of the present Administration is that it is possible, with no close study, to
despise them all. We will miss Melissa McCarthy’s send-up of
Spicer on Saturday Night Live, but beyond that, out of sight, out of mind.

The second story, rather less attended to, is that the
Senate referee [who knew they had one?] has ruled a number of elements of the Senate
health care bill ineligible for a process called Reconciliation that permits
bills to pass with only 51 votes. Among
the clauses not permitted is one stopping women from getting health care from
any organization that supports abortion.
Since without this clause, several extreme rightwingers will not vote
for the bill, it is now effectively impossible for it to pass. To be sure, the chances of passage were
already slender, but this kills the Republican health care effort dead in its
tracks. This is very good news indeed,
since any version of the Republican health care legislation would be
devastating for millions of people.

Meanwhile, the reliably execrable Jeff Sessions is in deeper
trouble than before, always a good thing.

Mind you, one must be an utterly incorrigible Tigger to take
any comfort from this news at all, but I have only one life to live, and I
insist on celebrating anything that offers even the slightest warmth to my cold
heart.

Jerry, your response to my brief post about my trip to the Musee d'Orsay has prompted a number of interesting comments. Would you want to write a guest post on some aspect of art and politics? Remember, if it should result in any significant sales, I get the usual agent's ten percent. :)

Friday, July 21, 2017

Well, folks, here we go. The Washington Post reports that Trump's team of lawyers are now discussing the scope of the President's power to pardon, including even whether he can pardon himself. And it isn't even August! So much for the Impressionists.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Susie and I went to the Musée d’Orsay this morning, the grand
museum fashioned out of what was once a train station. I am not much for museums, I confess, but
this one has a special place in my heart, in part because it was there, several years
ago, that we heard an exquisite performance of Allegrhi’s Miserere by the Tallis Singers, one of the truly great experiences
of my life. The d’Orsay’s collection of
Impressionist paintings is of course world famous. Surrounded by masses of tourists [Paris has
overcome its terrorist attacks and is again the premier destination in the
world for tourists], I took these IPhone shots of a pair of famous paintings by
Renoir. I am not sure you can see it in
my amateurish pictures, but the treatment of the dresses by Renoir is breathtaking.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

While I was taking my morning walk [along the circumference
of the 5th arrondissement], I reflected on several very significant
recent developments in American domestic politics. [I shall reserve to a later post my responses
to the wealth of interesting comments about morality and international affairs.] I refer first to the revelations regarding
the meeting between Kushner, Trump jr., and Manafort and an ever expanding
roster of characters, and second the collapse of the efforts of Senate Republicans
to do something, anything, about the Affordable Care Act.

The daily revelations about the meeting make it more and
more likely that there was a sustained, extensive, conscious, deliberate
attempt by Trump himself and his closest advisors to work hand in glove with
agents of the Russian government to defeat Hilary Clinton, in return for which
assistance Trump would deliver a lifting of economic sanctions and other
desiderata of the Putin government. You
may adopt any evaluative stance toward this effort you wish, but it is becoming
more and more implausible to deny that it occurred. Since Clinton was an historically awful
candidate, she would no doubt have contrived to lose the election all on her own,
but pretty clearly laws were broken, and Robert Mueller will, I should imagine,
prosecute a number of the members of Trump’s family, unless, as I expect, Trump
intervenes and issues a raft of plenary pardons. I rather doubt there could be revelations
sufficiently awful to prod the Republican House to vote a bill of impeachment. We shall have to wait and see.

The failure of Senate health care initiatives is splendid
news, for two reasons. First, it stops
the Congress and President from doing terrible, terrible harm to tens of
millions of people. Second, it
establishes the political truth that health care is now indeed the third rail
of modern American politics, as Social Security once was. [For the youthful among you, when subways
powered by electricity were introduced, the trains ran on a pair of parallel
rails through which no electricity flowed.
The power was delivered by a third rail.
You could jump down onto the tracks and touch the first two rails with
impunity, so long as you got back up before the next subway train ran over you,
but if, when doing so, you touched the third rail, you got electrocuted.] The third rail became first a metaphor and
then a cliché for a legally established right or program it was
political death to touch.

The Democrats, even those suicidally bent on resurrecting the
Clintonian Democratic Leadership Council’s Third Way, have taken notice of the
spontaneous upswelling of resistance to the Republican efforts to repeal the
ACA and seem collectively to possess the wit to make opposition to those
efforts the centerpiece of their 2018 campaign.
By one of those bizarre turns that makes politics so hard to predict, in
the midst of this ground level resistance, Single Payer seems to be gaining
support.

By the way, merely flying to Paris seems to have made it
possible for me to squelch the tendency to view American politics as the natural
center of the universe. Very liberating.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

This will be an extended post, beginning with the personal
and grandparental and ending in an extraordinary and really unforgivable bit if
self-congratulation perhaps justifying an intervention or clinical help. I apologize for this in advance, but have
decided that the confessional has a place on the web. Put it down, if you wish, to my advancing
age.

My granddaughter Athena will be nine on the first of August,
and I asked her mother for suggestions for appropriate presents. Apparently on a recent family trip to Tokyo,
Athena bought a little treasure box and has now begun a collection of objets d’art. Could I find in Paris an appropriate addition
to the collection? I had not a clue, but went on a ramble in our
Place Maubert neighborhood and ended up some while later in front of a shop at
the end of our street called Avanti
Musica which is stocked with all manner of little knick-knacks. There I found what I hope will be the perfect
gift, a decorated miniature treasure chest cum
music box with a dancing ballerina.

Buying presents for my grandchildren is difficult because
their doting parents have given them virtually everything that is both age
appropriate and available. Last
December, faced with the same problem for Samuel, who was turning eleven, I
decided that instead of asking his mother and father for guidance, I would give
him a present that no one else in the world could give to him: a copy of In
Defense of Anarchism, inscribed by the author. Now, I may be self-absorbed, but I am not yet
totally dotty. I had no thought that
Samuel would welcome this present or even look at it. But I wanted him to have some physical
evidence that his grandfather was not just the old guy back East. Perhaps in future years, even after I had passed
away, he would be moved to read it. I
had the fantasy, I confess, that in nine or ten years, when he was in college,
he would take a course in which the book was assigned, and could bring in his
copy to show the professor.

When you have spent your entire adult life writing books and
have arrived at the age of eighty-three, perhaps it is natural to wonder what
it all amounts to. Will anything you
have written survive your death? Is it
all fated to blow away like autumn leaves?
I found myself thinking that perhaps this one little book, no more than
an extended essay, would somehow manage to live, that it might even become, in
a small and subsidiary way, a part of the canon of works in the Western
tradition of political theory.

The works that have acquired that relative immortality are,
in at least one way, quite similar:
although each book was written at a particular moment in reaction to a
particular constellation of contemporary texts, it rises above that situational
embeddedness by setting forth an argument that lays claim to universality. No one anymore reads John Locke’s First Treatise on Civil Government,
which, for those of you who have always wondered, is a devastating attack on
Sir Robert Filmer’s defense of the divine right of kings. At the time, Filmer’s position was widely
held, but it very quickly was overtaken by history. Locke’s Second
Treatise, on the other hand, although manifestly a work of the late
seventeenth century, is read to this day by every serious student of political
theory. The same is true of Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract and Mill’s On Liberty.

Because of the peculiar circumstances under which In Defense of Anarchism was written, it contains
almost no references to contemporary philosophical debates. It is virtually devoid of scholarly footnotes
and addresses a single fundamental philosophical question sub specie aeternitatis. It
could have been written two hundred years ago, not fifty-two, or indeed one
hundred years from now.

Will it live? I would
like to think so. In the nature of the
case, I shan’t be around to find out, but perhaps eighty years from now, Samuel’s
grandson will tell his old grandfather about a little book he has just read in
college, and Samuel will take out a present from his grandfather and offer it to the young man for show and tell.

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Went to airport to fly to JFK, on the way to Paris. After clearing security, had leisurely snack
at 42nd Street Oyster House. Strolled to
gate. Discovered flight to JFK was
cancelled. Panic. Re-routed to direct London flight, then
flight to Paris. Major agita. This would mean going through Heathrow, the
world’s worst airport. Got to Paris,
went to baggage claim. Waited. Last bag came off flight. Not ours.
More panic. Went to baggage
office. Told by distracted young woman
that our bags would arrive from Philadelphia.
Philadelphia? What on earth were
our bags doing in Philadelphia? Took
taxi to apartment, unencumbered by luggage.
Good news, everything worked. Bad
news, computer was in luggage.
Called. Was told luggage would be
delivered the next day. Gave voice at
other end the building code. Was called
next day, told luggage would arrive between one and five in the afternoon. Waited.
Got a call. Luggage would be
delivered between five and nine p.m. Got
cranky. Meanwhile, jets flew low
overhead in Bastille Day display for Trump.
Considered emigrating to Canada.
Luggage arrived at 7:30. Walked
to Brasserie Balzar. Assigned to table 37,
my favorite. Had a dozen snails. Equanimity restored. Bonjour Paris!

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

I have sufficiently recovered from the shock of discovering
that Donald J. Trump is following me to Paris so that I can, in the quiet of my
comfortable office, make a stab at clarifying what I wrote about morality and
state actions. This exercise has helped
me to come to a clearer realization that the point of view I was trying to
articulate is nothing more than an elaboration or extension of the position I
set forth more than half a century ago in my little tract, In Defense of Anarchism. Say
what you will, at least I am consistent.

Moral judgments, strictly understood, are appropriately made
concerning the actions, intentions [and perhaps the characters] of
persons. Corporations are not persons
[the United States Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding], armies are
not persons, churches are not persons, fraternal organizations are not persons,
animals are not persons [I exempt dogs from this judgment, of course], the
environment is not a person, and most importantly for this discussion nation
states are not persons. Strictly
speaking, no nation acts, and therefore it makes no sense, again strictly
speaking, to judge that a nation’s acts have been moral or immoral, right or
wrong, justified or unjustified. People
act, often claiming to act in the name of a nation, or by virtue of a position
held in the government of a nation.
Almost impenetrable and unchallengeable mystifications conspire to make
it seem as though nations or corporations or armies or churches are persons or
possess personhood, that they, not the persons who occupy positions in them,
act and can be judged to have acted rightly or wrongly. But that appearance is always an illusion.

It makes perfectly good sense to make moral judgments about
the actions of individuals, even those individuals who claim to have
institutional authority by virtue of election, appointment, nomination and
confirmation, divine election, or some other procedure supposedly conferring
upon them rights not possessed by persons simpliciter,
but those claim are always
false. Such persons may have what I
called long ago de facto legitimate authority,
but they never, ever have de jure
legitimate authority. That is to say,
they may make those claims and succeed in getting them accepted by those
against whom or with regard to whom they make the claims. That can be described as conferring on them de facto legitimate authority. But all such claims are always false, a fact
which I try to express by the statement that no individual ever has de jure legitimate authority.

When a warplane belonging to the United States drops bombs
on a battlefield area, destroying a field hospital, it is common to say that
the United States has destroyed a field hospital. People then argue about whether this act by
the United States was morally justified or morally unjustified. That is always a mystified and misleading way
to speak. The men and women flying the
plane dropped the bombs, and they are morally responsible for doing so. The men and women who ordered them to drop
the bombs are morally responsible for issuing those orders. The high command who ordered the bombing
campaign are morally responsible for ordering that campaign. The civilian individuals “in the chain of
command” are morally responsible, as are all the individuals in the national
administration who participated in the decision, including even the low level
staffers who simply held the chairs for the big brass who sat at the table in
the Situation Room. The men and women
who voted for the elected officials bear some moral responsibility. And, most difficult of all to comprehend and
acknowledge, so too do all the
individual men and women who, by accepting the false claims of legitimate
authority advanced by those claiming to possess authority by virtue of some
process of election or appointment, strengthen those false claims and make it
more likely that orders issued from on high will be obeyed all the way down to
the men and women in the airplanes who actually press the buttons that cause
the bombs to be dropped.

Almost four centuries ago, John Locke argued that the kings
and queens of Europe were in a state of nature with one another because there
was no social contract of nations analogous to the social contract of
individuals about which he was writing.
This, and countless other writings over several millennia, have
encouraged us to think of nations as super-persons, as it were, as unitary
agents capable of making decisions and acting in ways that can be judged
morally. That is an illusion. It was false when Locke wrote and it is false
today. America does not act, Google does
not act, the Navy does not act, the Roman Catholic Church does not act, the NFL
does not act, Ben and Jerry’s does not act [although of course Ben does and so
does Jerry.]

If all this is true, as in fact it is, what then should each
of us as an individual agent do? Ah
well, that is the real question, of course, but before we can address it, first
we must clear away the illusions and mystifications of the state. Then perhaps, as Portnoy’s analyst suggests
in the very last line of the novel, we can begin.

At three p.m. today the taxi comes to take us to the airport. Before then, I hope to write a reply to Jerry Fresia and others. But this morning, I have learned truly disastrous news. DONALD J. TRUMP IS GOING TO PARIS TODAY!!!! As I was taught long ago by old Marxists, there are no accidents in history. Obviously Trump is doing this to torture me. I must think deeply and divine the true world-historical meaning of this conjuncture.RATS.

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

We fly off to Paris tomorrow for two weeks. I shall blog from there as soon as we are settled in. I want to try to clarify my post in response to Jerry Fresia, because I think, as so often happens, I did not make myself clear. Perhaps I can do that tomorrow morning or later today.Meanwhile, I am enjoying the discomfiture of Donald Jr. I predict a plenary presidential pardon is in the offing.

Monday, July 10, 2017

I should like to spend a little time commenting on Jerry
Fresia’s response to my North Korea story, and on a quite informative story in
Counterpunch.org, the first of two to which he links. Here is what Jerry says:

“Malcolm X insightfully noted more than half a century ago
that if you read the newspaper everyday, you'll end up loving your enemies and
hating your friends. A more modern version of that quip might be that if you
get your news from the NYTs and MSNBC you'll live within the liberal bubble,
not knowing diddly-squat about "our" official enemies.

To wit, check out these pieces on NK found in Counterpunch.org (can you imagine
Rachel reporting thusly??) - all of which compels me to add, quoting Naomi
Klein, that Trump is more a symptom of our malady and not the cause: http://bit.ly/2tpEN8Ohttp://bit.ly/2tyERBi”

The article has a great deal of detailed information about
long-range missiles in general and North Korea’s missile program in particular,
a quick summary of which is that it will take much longer than popularly imagined
for North Korea to develop reliable, usable Intermediate Range and
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles [IRBMs and ICBMs]. But the ideological thrust of the story is
what I wish to address today. Rather
than trying to summarize the article, I am going to assume that those of you
who are interested have taken the time to read it. I shall launch into my discussion with that
assumption as a background.

Over the course of the last five thousand years, give or
take a millennium, a number of states have sought and achieved imperial status,
which we may describe as the successful exercise of significant influence and
control beyond their national borders.
Many, but perhaps not all, have claimed the moral, religious, political,
or racial high ground, representing themselves as deserving of their imperial sway
by virtue of their superiority in one or more of these ways. The Greeks characterized those speaking other
languages as barbarians, initially a
mnemonic characterization of the way other languages sounded to them [“bar bar
bar”] but later a dismissal of other cultures as inferior. Chinese rulers claimed the Mandate of Heaven. The British manfully bore the White Man’s
Burden. The Soviets saw themselves as
the avant garde of history. And so forth.

Americans have long congratulated themselves in a similar
fashion, describing their break-away slave state as the first nation in history
created as the embodiment of an idea, the Idea of Freedom. After the end of the Second World War, America
appropriated the self-congratulatory title of Leader of the Free World, and
went on to issue annual lists of nations that it judged to be failing to make
suitable progress toward the successful imitation of The American
Experiment. In an eerie fashion, Donald
J. Trump’s compulsive self-aggrandizing braggadocio is a natural extension of
America’s claim to moral supremacy in the international arena. Unreconstructed American patriots take all of
this quite literally and either ignore or deny the overwhelming contrary
evidence. Enlightened liberals condemn
America’s actions as a fall from grace and demand that the nation live up to
its founding principles and ideals, thus granting the premise of the imperial
rationalization.

I don’t imagine I have to spend any time explaining why I
consider all of this arrant nonsense.
What interests me in the post is the fact that the successful claim of
the moral and political high ground [successful in the descriptive sense of
getting the claim accepted, grudgingly or not, by those to whom it is made] is
a form of power quite as real and often quite as effective as military or
economic power. Insofar as America can
present itself to the world as humanity’s moral arbiter, the embodiment of the
ideal of democracy, a shining city upon a hill, a beacon held high to inspire
those who are downtrodden but aspire to [American-style] democracy, it gains
the capacity to shape world affairs in ways favorable to its interests. This capacity is sometimes referred to as “soft
power,” admiringly by those who value its effectiveness, dismissively by those
who think to assert their manhood by valorizing weapons and uniformed soldiers.

But the power of successful claims of moral superiority is
unlike military or economic power in one striking and significant way: this power requires, for its effective
exercise, that those wielding it actually believe the absurd claims they are
making! A gun, even a quite
sophisticated model, does not come outfitted with an ideology. It makes no claims, it just shoots when the
trigger is pulled. But I cannot think
of a single imperial power whose rulers did not actually believe that they had
the Mandate of Heaven, or bore the White Man’s Burden, or led a nation
embodying The Idea of Freedom.

So, when American State Department officials or Presidents
condemn North Korea as a rogue state, a sponsor of terrorism, a violator of UN
dictates, a breaker of international agreements, while simultaneously ignoring
America’s own sponsorship of terrorists, its repeated overthrow of
democratically elected governments, its embrace of nations such as Israel whose
nuclear weapons are a violation of the same United Nations regulations, part of
their success in getting the world to take their condemnation seriously derives
from their own belief in the supposed grounds of that condemnation.

There is nothing in the least unusual either in America’s
claims or in the self-delusions of its leaders.
If America can get the world to take seriously its moral pretensions,
that is a form of power quite as effective as [and rather more flexible in its
deployment than] a carrier group sailing in the North China Sea.

I strongly recommend that we avoid the error of imagining that
if we [I.e. America] have dirty hands
then those whom the American government condemns must have clean hands. I suggest that when it comes to nation
states, we should forsake moral judgments and simply strive to understand as
best we can what is happening or is likely to happen. This is not to say that we should cease
judging the world morally. Not at all! Each of us must choose what he or she
believes right, which men and women are our comrades, as I have put it
elsewhere. We must be unrelenting in our
efforts to advance what is good and combat what is evil.

With regard to North Korea, which was the
subject that provoked this post, it seems to me clear that it would be better
if North Korea did not have nuclear weapons, just as it would be better if
Israel did not have nuclear weapons, if India and Pakistan did not have nuclear
weapons, if the United States and Russia and China and Great Britain and France
did not have nuclear weapons. It would
be better if Iran were not to develop nuclear weapons. There is simply no good argument for the
existence of nuclear weapons. But it
does not surprise me in the slightest that the United States should portray
North Korea’s development of missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons as
a world-historical threat, nor does it surprise me that the American officials
claiming that believe it themselves.
Insofar as they can get the rest of the world to believe that, they will
have successfully deployed a certain measure of soft power in pursuit of
America’s regional geopolitical aims.
Our time would be better spent debating whether we support or oppose America’s
pursuit of those regional aims

Saturday, July 8, 2017

It is a quiet Saturday morning in this Continuing Care Retirement
Community, or old people’s home, as I think of it, and a good time to respond
to some recent comments. First, I note
with manifest pleasure Jerry Brown’s Trumpesque expression of the blessedness
of reading my blog. All groveling
gratefully accepted. [For those
incapable of detecting irony in the absence of emoticons, this was not meant
seriously.]

But on to more serious matters. Anonymous writes as follows: “I have some disagreements with your view on
Trump and Russia that I was wondering if you could address. As you have
discussed on here before, Chomsky has argued that the one decent policy to come
out of the Trump administration (or sentiment) is Trump's desire to have better
relations with Russia. He believes this because, even if Trump's campaign coordinated
with the Russians in the 2016 election, such a relationship could avert a
nuclear war between the two powers.

My concern with your view is this: even if we assume that Trump himself
colluded with the Russian government in 2016 to win the Presidency, and even if
Trump himself is under the control of Putin (a worst-case scenario), would this
treasonous act not still be somewhat desired so as to avoid the very real
threat of a US-Russia war which would result in nuclear catastrophe? Yes,
treason is something to be taken seriously even in the formal democracy of the
United States, but if this treason resulted in us avoiding a nuclear
catastrophe, shouldn't we be at least hesitant to want Trump impeached
(assuming that other figures/administrations would simply take the traditional,
hostile stance towards Russia)?”

This is a very interesting and rather complex comment and
question. I shall try to address it as
clearly as I can. But I should say at the outset that I am hindered by an
inability to make really plausible estimates of the probabilities of the
various dangers Anonymous refers to. I
cannot speak for Noam, of course, but I am somewhat doubtful that he can do
much better in that regard, even though he is more knowledgeable than I.

First of all, if it
is true that we now face a very serious threat of an American/Russian nuclear
war, and if it is also true that
Trump’s stance with regard to Russia materially reduces that threat, then there is a good argument for
embracing Trumps’ Russia policy, such as it may be, as a very necessary
evil. A nuclear war would be so terrible
that even if the price of avoiding it were the end of the American political
system as we know it, or even the end of America’s independence as a nation, that
would perhaps be a price worth paying. I
am not sure everyone these days understands just how civilization-endingly
terrible a nuclear war would be.
Chomsky, of course, does.

My problem with Chomsky’s point of view, and hence with
Anonymous’ question, is that I have serious doubts about the first of the
premises and grave doubts, bordering on disbelief, about the second. Let me take them in turn.

Ever since nuclear weapons were invented, there has been a
great risk of accidental or unintended nuclear war and some risk, less I think,
that a nuclear armed nation will deliberately initiate a nuclear war. Short of the nuclear disarmament for which I
argued and worked sixty years ago, preventing accidental or unintended nuclear
war requires three things: First, that
the weapons systems be stable and well-protected [in hardened silos or on
nuclear submarines] so that snap decisions do not have to be made about
potential threats under conditions in which mistakes are easily possible; Second, that each adversary possesses
sufficient nuclear weapons to respond with unacceptable force [unacceptable to
the opponent] to even a nation-destroying first strike; and third, that both adversaries [or all, if
there are more than two] make their aims and actions unambiguously clear, so
that miscalculations, misunderstandings, and battlefield confusion are reduced
to an absolute minimum. These conditions
have for the most part been met during the past half century in confrontations
between The Soviet Union [afterwards Russia] and America, although there have
been several terrifyingly close calls, most notably the so-called Cuban Missile
Crisis [in which John F. Kennedy was the principal source of the danger, in my judgment.] They are, I believe, met today, despite such
provocative actions as the placement of weaponry in Eastern Europe by the United
States and the annexation of Crimea and attempted annexation of Ukraine by
Russia. [I am not really interested in,
and will not discuss, whether any of these actions was, in any sense, “justified.”] In the absence of irrational or unpredictable
actions on the part of the Americans or Russians, I do not think that the
danger of nuclear war is greater now than it was five, ten, or fifteen years
ago. [I leave entirely to one side the confrontation
between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, which has its own terrors and dangers].

Do I know these judgment to be true? Good God, no.
How could I? It is my best guess,
and if Chomsky says that I am wrong, well, he may be right, but then again I
may be right.

It is the second premise whose dubiousness really seems
manifest to me. Trump clearly has no
idea at all what he is doing, either in domestic or in international affairs. He has nothing remotely akin to a coherent
policy, strategy, or point of view regarding Russia, and I see no sign that he
will acquire one. Of one thing I am
certain: characterizing the question as
one of “having better relation with Russia” is entirely the wrong way to think
about these matters. International
Relations is not relationship counseling.
Avoiding a nuclear war calls not for two men to like one another, or for
them to get along, or for them to have “better relations,” and as for the
relationship between two countries, all such language drawn from popular talk
about interpersonal relationships is utterly irrelevant. Avoiding a nuclear war between two nations
neither of which seeks to have a nuclear war requires clarity, predictability, successful
and reliable channels of communication, and rationality.

Putin is, in my utterly amateurish judgment, quite capable
of behaving with self-interested rationality on the basis of clear,
predictable, reliable channels of communication. Trump is not, and in my guesstimate is just
as likely to react irrationally toward Putin when they are BFFs as when they
are sworn enemies.

For what it is worth, I judge that Pence would be more predictable, albeit equally despicable.

For these reasons, I am dubious about Chomsky’s expressed
view concerning the relationship between Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia.

Friday, July 7, 2017

Well, Trump is sucking up to Putin and my back has stopped
hurting so I think it is time to take stock.
The behavior of the President is so revolting, the actions of his
Cabinet so randomly evil, the behavior of the Congressional and Senatorial
Republicans so maliciously cruel that it is difficult to achieve any balanced
perspective on the American political scene.
While I have been shelving books and putting up pictures, I have been
turning over in my mind what I have read and seen on television lately. The NYTIMES
Op Ed piece by Penn and Stein served, like a train wreck, to concentrate my
mind, and this morning during my daily walk I sorted through my thoughts. Herewith, as best I am able, are the
conclusions to which I came.

I begin with two facts that define the terrain on which
political struggles are fought in America and circumscribes the realm of the
possible. First, a sizable fraction of
the electorate, but by no means a majority, supports or can be brought to
support progressive social and economic policies – policies that I think of as
constituting enlightened welfare state capitalism. Some fraction of that fraction is sympathetic
to European style social democracy – strong labor unions, single payer health
care, and the like – and a very much smaller fraction of that fraction of a
fraction can actually contemplate collective ownership of the means of
production without having an attack of the vapors.

Second, in round numbers, two-thirds of eligible voters vote
in Presidential election years and one-third vote in off-year Congressional
elections.

From these two facts I draw two conclusions, one depressing
the other not so. My first conclusion is
that at least as things stand now, a robust progressive Social Democratic-style
set of institutions and proposals has little or no chance of becoming the new
normal, the accepted, unquestioned daily politics for which a majority will
vote reflexively if nothing special is going on. There are countries where that is indeed the
norm, but America is not and is not likely to become one of them, at least in
my lifetime [a short time span, admittedly.]

My second conclusion is that transient enthusiasms can have
a considerable effect on the character of the government actually elected and
the policies actually enacted. With only
a third of the electorate voting in off-years and two-thirds in Presidential
years, intensity of preference, as rational choice theorists put it, actually
makes a very great deal of difference in election outcomes. The reason is simple: a passionate vote
counts for no more than an indifferent one, but passionate voters are more likely
to vote.

At the moment, for a variety of reasons, most of which have
weird orange hair, the progressive fraction is more fired up than at any time I
can recall, including the anti-war days of the Viet Nam era. People are donating money, they are calling the
offices of their Representatives and Senators, they are attending Town Halls,
they are even volunteering to run for local public office. This intensity of political expression and
action began the day after the Inauguration, and it does not seem to be
subsiding.

For these reasons, I think this is a moment, our moment, to
translate the intensity on our side into some form of measurable political power. A strong, uncompromising progressive program,
strongly supportive of workers’ rights and especially union rights, a program calling
for a federal minimum wage of at least $15/hr., for stringent controls of Wall
Street, for higher taxes on the rich, for a trillion dollar infrastructure
program -- all of that can win in the present political climate. Mind you, this moment will not last – no such
moments do. The coalition of actual
voters making this possible will dissipate before very long, and we will have
to fight endless rear-guard actions against those seeking to reverse what we
have accomplished. But I am convinced
this is a moment when such programs, and the candidates who support them, can
indeed win.

Clearly the touchstone issue, the mobilizer, is health care,
so this is the moment when we should “defend” Obamacare by proposing to
transform it into universal single payer health insurance. We should make not merely the defense but the
extension of health insurance the centerpiece of a comprehensive progressive
program, and we should seek out candidates at every level who will embrace that
proposal and run on it.

I believe that in 2018 the forces of reaction will be
dispirited and will not turn out to vote.
Even if I am right, the moment
will not last. We must make the most of
it.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

In the NY TIMES today, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein have an Op Ed column calling for the Democrats to shun the left-wing socialistic extremism of Sanders and Warren and return to the winning ways of Bill Clinton. I am not going to summarize it. You can read it here, if you have the stomach for it.I think it is entirely possible that Hilary Clinton will make another run in 2020 [billed, no doubt, as her re-election campaign.] Let us not be fooled. Right now, the Clinton forces are the best organized, best funded, and most deeply embedded faction of the Democratic Party. If progressives do not field a host of good candidates in 2018 and win a ton of races, we will see a replay of 2016.If that happens, I can kiss progressive politics goodbye for as long as I figure to live.

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

For what it is worth, here is an apparently more knowledgeable discussion of the subject about which I blogged a little while ago. This does not sound very hopeful, even if America were to pledge not to attack North Korea, as Chomsky has, I gather, suggested. This is a scary world. It is no satisfaction at all that I, along with many others, anticipated these sorts of problems more than half a century ago. Saying "I told you so" as the bombs drop is right up there with Slim Pickens riding a nuke down in Dr. Strangelove waving his hat like a bronco buster.

First of all, let us be very clear. I do not read, write, or speak Korean. Although one of my books has been translated into Korean, I know absolutely nothing about the country save what little I have read in English. Even though I have spent eighty-three years in the United States, I often find it difficult to figure out what the American government is going to do. So take what follows for what it is worth.Newspaper reports paint Kim Jong-un as unstable and irrational and brutal, but not at all as self-destructive or self-defeating. I am guessing he knows that if he launched a missile attack that hit any part of American soil [Alaska, if that is all he can reach -- who knows?] the result would be a nuclear response that would obliterate his country and result in his death. Mind you, I do not know this, not at all. I am guessing. If what I have read is true [remember, everything I think I know, whether I learned it from CNN or Noam Chomsky, is second-hand and could quite possibly be wrong], a non-nuclear "limited" war between North Korea and South Korean and American forces would result in huge numbers of Korean deaths on both sides and a great many American deaths.I seriously doubt that Donald J. Trump could find North Korea on a map with country labels attached, I am reasonably certain that he would not care in the slightest who got killed in a war, so long as his real estate holdings and brands were untouched. I am extremely fearful that his tiny ego would become deeply engaged by any perceived slight from North Korea to his manhood or his magnificence.There are extremely deeply rooted institutional obstacles to independent actions by the American military countermanding what they perceive as irrational orders from the Commander-in-Chief, but in the present circumstances I could imagine that saner heads in the Joint Chiefs would find ways to slow-walk such orders and even subvert them. There is precedent for that during the Nixon presidency, I believe.All of which, put together, is unsettling, to put it as calmly as I can.Meanwhile, I am quite certain that the Trump Administration is right now doing great harm to the most vulnerable among us here in America, and will continue to do that at least until 2018 and probably until 2020.From all of the above, I draw the simplest and most banal conclusion imaginable, namely that we must struggle to win back the House and even, God willing, the Senate, and that we must try to wrest from the Republicans the 1000 seats in State legislatures that slipped away while Obama floated above the fray with inimitable grace. In short, I conclude that our only hope of a better future lies in banal, unexciting ordinary politics.More anon.

We are at a perilous moment vis-a-vis North Korea. I am not interested in apportioning blame, of which there is a great deal to go around. That can come later. None of us at this point can do anything other than hope that there is not a war, in which huge numbers of people would die.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

On Sunday, I posted a brief essay in which I linked to a Nicholas
Kristof column detailing some of the extraordinary gains that have been made in
recent years in reducing starvation levels of poverty in the world, combating
age-old scourges like leprosy, and making clean water available to those
without it. I suggested that these gains
put into perspective the evils visited on us by the infantile narcissistic
bully in the White House. I was, I
confess, somewhat surprised by the response of LFC, seconded by local details
from S. Wallerstein. “Before
celebrating too much about the decline of extreme poverty,
some things should be noted,” LFC wrote, citing, among other things, the fact
that three-quarters of a billion [!] people remain in extreme poverty
world-wide. S. Wallerstein offered a few
details about just how little “$1.90 a day” will actually buy in Santiago,
Chile, where he lives.

As it happens, I agree with every single word both LFC and
S. Wallerstein wrote, but I wondered, Why did they feel it necessary to write
what they did? To whom were their comments
directed, and for what purpose? I
puzzled over this during my morning walk [to which I have returned after
several days spent rehabilitating my aching and aging back] and here is what I
have come up with.

There are two very different standpoints from which one can
view the world: as passive, though interested, observer, and as engaged activist. The observer and the activist have the same
information available to them [although the activist may have a wealth of particular
and intimate detail about one problem or region of the world that the observer
lacks], but their orientation to that information is quite different. Compare the point of view of an aid worker who
spends years in the field working to reduce the extreme poverty of the men,
women, and children in one village in Africa with the point of view of one of
us reading Kristof’s column. The aid
worker, we may suppose, spends ten or twelve hours a day helping the people in
the village to dig wells that yield clean water, teaching more productive ways
of using their desperately meagre resources to increase crop yields, calling in
assistance from a network of city lawyers to fight the exploitation of local landlords. She does this not for a week, or even for a month
but for years on end. A new well is a
victory, an expansion of the crop yields a triumph, one court victory against a
rapacious landlord, after a series of disheartening defeats, a cause for
celebration. She is perpetually aware of
how small her victories are when measured against the appalling misery and
poverty in the midst of which she lives and works. But she is a human being, not a balance
sheet, and she must take heart from every advance, no matter how small, if she
is to keep at her work and draw emotional sustenance from it. For her, the Kristof column is a reassurance
that she is not alone, that her work, along with that of so many others, is
having a measurable impact on the world’s poorest and most powerless people.

The observer contemplates the world equanimously and with
admirable balance, ever on the alert for false voices saying the crisis is
over, the worst is behind us, we may relax our efforts and pursue our
comfortable lives untroubled by the misery of others. To the observer, who is, after all, not
actually doing anything about
poverty, or leprosy, or unsafe water, save perhaps casting a vote every two
years and donating a bit of money now and again to Doctors Without Borders, the
moral high ground is seized by those whose condemnation of evil is unrelenting and
every positive report is rejected as a self-serving invitation to
inaction. Any celebration of progress is
viewed as a form of moral back-sliding, of that worst of all political sins,
moderation. To the observer, the Kristof
column sounds suspiciously like the self-satisfaction of a Clintonian.

Let me speak personally for a moment. I have done precious little in my life save
offer opinions, and thanks to certain oddities of the mid-Twentieth Century American
Academy, the more extreme the opinions I expressed, the more my salary went
up. But I did after all actually do something besides offer opinions – for twenty-five
years I raised bits of money to help poor Black young men and women to attend
historically Black universities in South Africa. The amounts were trivial -- $40,000 in a good
year – but thanks to the exchange rate, it was enough to enable fifty or sixty young
people each year to pay the portion of tuition due at registration, thereby
making them eligible for government funded loans. I was painfully aware that my bursary
recipients were so few in number that my efforts did not even cause a blip in
the South African university enrolment figures, but when I met the students on
my annual visits, I drew encouragement and strength in my effort from their
excitement, energy, and youthful enthusiasm.
I even received a cherished award after all those years in the form of
an honorary degree from the University of the Western Cape, conferred on me by
the titular Chancellor of the university, Archbishop Desmond Tutu himself!

Had someone sought to throw cold water on my excited reports
of my trips to South Africa, pointing out to me that my efforts had failed to
correct the deep-rooted educational inequities in South Africa, my response
would have been that the comment entirely missed the point. I needed any encouragement I could muster to
keep at the effort for a quarter of a century, long after the novelty had worn
off and the attention of lefties like myself had moved on to other inequities,
other needs, other peoples.

So I should like to suggest that we allow ourselves to
rejoice in Kristof’s statistics. The
magnitude of the improvement in human life summarized by those statistics is
enormous. Save the cavils and cautionary
reminders for those who take Kristof’s column as an excuse for inaction.

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Two columns in the NY
TIMES this morning, combined with my son Patrick’s account of a recent
family trip to Tokyo, give me a striking and somewhat counterintuitive picture
of the way of the world, a picture that does not bode well for America in the
decades ahead.

The first column, by Nicholas Kristof, chronicles the
dramatic improvement in the health and living conditions of the poorest
hundreds of millions of men, women, and children in the world. Since 1985, Kristof tells us, the incidence
of leprosy, an age-old scourge of the poor and malnourished, has been reduced
by 97%, and may be reduced effectively to zero by 2020. Kristof writes, “There has been a stunning
decline in extreme poverty, defined as less than about $2 per person per day,
adjusted for inflation. For most of history, probably more than 90 percent of
the world population lived in extreme poverty, plunging to fewer
than 10 percent today. Every day,
another 250,000 people graduate from extreme poverty, according to World Bank
figures. About 300,000 get electricity for the first time. Some 285,000 get
their first access to clean drinking water…Family planning leads parents to
have fewer babies and invest more in each. The number of global war deaths is
far below what it was in the 1950s through the 1990s, let alone the murderous
1930s and ’40s.”

These figures are staggering. If one believes, as I do, that each human life
has the same worth, and that one person’s pain or suffering ought to count for
as much in the universal felicific calculus as another’s, then the sheer
magnitude of these improvements swamps those bad things currently being done to
and by Americans that I and many others obsess over. One does not have to be a Polyanna, not even
a Tigger, to celebrate the fact that every
day 285,000 people get access to clean drinking water for the first time.

The second column I read this morning is by the always
interesting Frank Bruni, a lament to the increasing unlivability of his beloved
New York City. Bruni writes sadly,
angrily, of the congestion in the subways, of the breakdown of the city’s
infrastructure, of the eternal political antagonism between the mayor and the
governor. When I grew up in New York, seventy
years ago, it was a manageable city, a human city, a city where a boy from a
lower middle class family in Queens could ride the IND line to Manhattan and
explore. Later, in the 60’s, when I
returned to teach at Columbia, things had become a good deal worse, especially
for the shrinking working class population.
Bruni’s column suggests that the New York to which I shall be returning
this Fall as a member of Columbia’s Society of Senior Scholars has become unmanageable
for all but the very rich, who wall themselves off from the quotidian life of what was, and perhaps
still is, America’s premier metropolis.

Patrick’s description of Tokyo –vast, modern, new, as active
below street level as it is above – offered me an image of what New York might
have been, had the necessary public expenditures been made over the decades to
repair, replace, and expand the public spaces.
The only great city with which I am intimately familiar now is Paris,
and though it is not a Tokyo, new, gleaming, utterly modern, yet it remains a
thoroughly human city where one can enjoy the delights of an urban existence.

What lessons do I learn from these two columns and Patrick’s
travelogue? The first, as you might
expect, is that Marx was right.
Capitalism is and remains the most revolutionary force ever unleashed on
the human world, revolutionary both for ill and for good. As Bruni writes, “For most of history,
probably more than 90 percent of the world population lived in extreme
poverty, plunging to
fewer than 10 percent today.” It is
capitalism that accomplished this. Marx
was not a Luddite. As he observed in a
famous passage in the Manifesto, “[T]he bourgeoisie has subjected the country
to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased
the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population
from the idiocy of rural life.” [Compare this with the following remark by
Sherlock Holmes: “It is my belief,
Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London
do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and
beautiful countryside.”]

Socialism, when it comes at long last, will conquer the
hideous inequality of capitalism, but the groundwork, as it were, will have
been done by capitalism’s destruction of feudalism and slavery. We may allow ourselves to dream, with Leon
Trotsky, that under socialism, “[m]an will become immeasurably stronger, wiser
and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic,
his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The
average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a
Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” [The great concluding lines of Literature and Revolution.]

The second lesson I learn from today’s proof texts and
Patrick’s report is that in this century, it will not be America that leads the
way to a better world. America is very
wealthy, if one aggregates rather than averages, and it is and will remain the
one great military superpower, but for all that, the rest of the world may
simply pass us by, so that we become an immensely rich, unimaginably powerful
backwater. The evidence suggests that
our universities will continue to be the Mecca for graduate students in many
disciplines, but those coming will prepare themselves for substandard living
conditions, as American students traveling abroad did when I was young. Large regions of our nation will wear virtual
warning signs, “Proceed at your own risk!
The natives are poor, nasty, brutish, and short on human decency.”

Well, I seem to be in a dyspeptic mood today. A Trump presidency will do that to you.

Saturday, July 1, 2017

When I was a boy, I lived in a tiny row house in the new
development of Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, New York. One day, my father and I rode by bus to the
Jamaica Public Library where I checked out, on my father’s card, a fat, stubby
book containing all four novels and fifty-six stories chronicling the
adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
I was enthralled, and the next Christmas, my parents gave me my very own
copy, which I read and re-read until the cover frayed. I even joined an association of Sherlock
Holmes fans called The Baker Street Irregulars and every three months received
their journal, filled with faux scholarly
articles about disputed minutiae of the life of the great detective. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Holmes
stories, aspired to a more distinguished career than scribbler of lowbrow
detective fiction, but the popularity of the stories trapped him. Finally, in 1893, he could stand it no longer
and contrived to kill off his hero in the famous Reichenbach Falls finale of The Final Problem. Conan Doyle was rewarded nine years later
with the coveted knighthood, becoming for all time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Like his musical contemporary, Arthur
Sullivan, his aspiration to the higher reaches of art had been rewarded by a
tap on the shoulder and elevation to the peerage. But the Holmes fans, who were legion, would
not leave poor Sir Arthur alone, and in 1903, with a contrivance that would
make a modern soap opera writer blush, he brought Holmes back from the dead in The Adventure of the Empty House.

I have been absent from these pages for only two weeks, not
ten years, my time completely occupied by moving, if not to an empty house, at
least to an empty apartment. But the
worst of the move is now behind me, thanks to the efforts of my son, Tobias,
and my wife’s grandsons, Noah and Ezra, who gathered here two days ago to
unpack my books and put them on the shelves in alphabetical order. Although there are still many pictures to be
hung [including one large canvas of abstract blue splotches which my wife and I
agree looks better horizontal than the intended vertical], I am sufficiently
settled in to return to my daily animadversions against the contemporary scene.

As I anticipated, the world took no notice of my absence. The two most notable political developments in
the interim were the regrettable loss of Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s 6th
Congressional District and the apparent inability of the Senate Republicans to
complete the medical evisceration of the poor.
The second, which gives us reason to hope, is far more important than
the first, for all the attention the by-election received. With the soupçon
of Tiggrish optimism I have managed to recapture during my absence from
blogging, I allow myself to adopt the happy view that this and other
by-elections portend big losses for the Republicans in the 2016 Congressional
elections. If we can produce the same
magnitude of shift from Republicans to Democrats in three dozen CDs around the
country, we will put paid to Paul Ryan’s Ayn Randesque adolescent fantasies.

Far more troubling is the increasing evidence of the profound
mental instability of the President.
Rather than speculate on what the future holds, I will refer you to this recent analysis by my son, Tobias, who thinks more deeply and passionately
about current political affairs than I can manage.

To be brutally honest, I am deeply fearful that Trump will
act impulsively and dangerously on the international scene, moved in his
infantile narcissistic way by an imagined slight. We must ask seriously whether the senior
military would collectively refuse to obey an irrationally self-destructive
order coming from the Oval Office.

In His Last Bow,
published on the eve of World War I, Holmes says to Watson, “There’s an east
wind coming, Watson." Watson misinterprets the meaning of the words and
says, "I think not, Holmes. It is very warm."

"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a
changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never
blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us
may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a
cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has
cleared."

That was a simpler age, and neither Conan Doyle nor his
readers could anticipate the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald, of Dresden and
Hiroshima and Nagasaki that lay not too far in the future. Would that I could write with such sublime confidence
of our own cold east wind.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.